Jason Priem asked me to give a keynote at the altmetrics12 workshop at Northwestern on 21 June. Unfortunately, the timing of #altmetrics12 isn’t very convenient. I was supposed to be on a plane on my way to #ALA12 in Anaheim. But, I think metrics are important and have written about what SSRN is doing in this space.

I have been anxious this week because I need to submit an abstract by 18 May. There are a lot of interesting things happening in metrics and I’m not sure what I’ll talk about. At first, I thought I would discuss the importance of being succinct and not using tools just because you can (e.g, Prezi vs Powerpoint) but that doesn’t seem very exciting. And the stuff happening in altmetrics is pretty exciting.

A few days ago I was interviewed at the American Anthropological Association and I said, referring to grey literature, that Grey is the New Black. I explained how my publisher friends used to ask me why anyone would want grey literature or if I thought there really was any value in it. Heck, it wasn’t peer reviewed, printed and distributed … several months to years after it had been written. I see altmetrics as being a lot like working papers 20 years ago. Maybe we should call them grey metrics …

It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, but I know what I’m going to talk about

Sustainability is one of the hottest areas of scholarly research, and SSRN’s newest research network. GSE Research sponsors our Sustainability Research Policy Network. I’ve known its founder John Peters for a few years and recently caught up with him to ask a few questions about the what, how, and why of sustainability and working with SSRN.

Q: Tell us about yourself & GSE Research

I am the founder and Chief Executive of GSE Research. My background is inconsultancy, publishing and higher education. Until the end of 2010 I was CEO of Emerald Group Publishing
and Emerald Inc but felt by then that I really wanted to embark on a new challenge, one with a focus on the issues I believe matter most to the world today. I started GSE Research early in 2011 as a scholarly publisher with a philosophy of inclusivity and integrity. The focus is clear: Governance, Sustainability and Environment – the key areas in which we need more and better research in order to overcome the crises currently facing the planet.

I try to keep connected with higher education, and have visiting roles with two UK universities.

Q: Why did you choose to focus on sustainability?

We need to learn to live and work sustainably if we are to survive as a species. With over 7 billion people alive on the planet, the challenges of feeding, housing, educating and employing them are intense. The pressure on resources – natural, economic and social – is unprecedented and it will take massive commitments of time, money and ingenuity to relieve some of that pressure. But I’m a natural optimist and I have real faith in the ability of intelligent people, with sufficient good will and determination, to solve the most difficult problems and to give humanity (and the planet we depend on) a viable long-term future.

Q: What is sustainability research?

A question with probably as many answers as there are researchers in the field! For me sustainability research is research which looks for solutions to some of the problems I’ve alluded to before: research into alternative energy sources; into recycling and waste management; into establishing social and organisational structures free from the corruption that keeps so much of the world in poverty.

There are many of the world’s smartest people working in the world’s universities, and I believe part of the role of a publisher today is to connect that research with policymakers and practitioners.

Q: How does it impact the world?

Profoundly! This stuff matters – probably more than anything else at this moment in history. We have to solve the world’s biggest and most intractable problems – not just for today or tomorrow but for the long term. If the smartest, best educated people we have aren’t focusing their minds on making that happen, then what are they doing?

Q: You are a successful publisher, why partner with SSRN?

GSE’s publishing philosophy is very close to that of SSRN and we believe that real synergy is possible between the two organisations. Like SSRN, we want to encourage the profusion and promulgation of ideas. We share a belief that publication shouldn’t be solely about the final output of a shiny academic paper, which has taken three years to see the light of day, but should include the opportunity to bring ideas into the public domain in order to engage in debate and discussion to strengthen those ideas and to allow others to use them, sooner rather than later, in order to find the next phase of solutions to our problems.

We are delighted to be publishing the SRPN in partnership with SSRN as part of our commitment to innovation in publishing and scholarship in this area.

Thanks John, we are excited to be working with you!

This week I’m attending the JCDL 2011 (ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) in Ottawa, Canada and presenting during the Thinking Back and Looking Forward session of the Disciplinary Repositories Workshop.  This year’s theme is “Digital Libraries: Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Research Data” and our workshop will give anyone the chance to see how disciplinary repositories really work.  This is your chance to ask real questions to real people that are running real DRs.  Here is a list of presenters.

If you too are attending and would like to meetup, send me a message.

Michael C. Jensen, SSRN‘s Chairman and Professor Emeritus gave the commencement address to the graduating class of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business on Saturday May 21.

Jensen spoke to the class about integrity, authenticity and being committed to something bigger than oneself – topics drawn from work with his co-author, Werner Erhard .

Jensen explains that integrity is a matter of one’s word – nothing more, nothing less.  Both personal and organizational integrity, he said, lead to high performance and trust.

Full video here, Jensen begins at about 10 minutes in.

During the commencement, the university also awarded Jensen an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

If you haven’t seen Mike talk previously, I encourage you watch his address.  His research has had an incredible impact on me both personally and professionally.  Thanks Mike!

I’m speaking at the ORCID (Open Research and Contributor ID) Meeting at Harvard on May 18th. ORCID is a global initiative tackling the author name ambiguity issue, with over 200 participating organizations including academic institutions, publishers, societies, corporate, non-profit and government organizations.

Author names create a lot problems for repositories like SSRN. We often find errors and inconsistencies with common, hyphenated, and non-English names, especially those with foreign characters. The problem grows exponentially when you accept submissions from a variety of sources, each with their own quality criteria.  It is no longer accurate or reliable to depend on first name/last cataloging. Even before the dawn of the digital age, scholarly research and publishing struggled with this challenge and now, it has become an issue that needs to be resolved.

ORCID is a community of minds working to create a central registry/ID, where each author/contributor would have their own unique ID.

“Accurate identification of researchers and their work is one of the pillars for the transition from science to e-Science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the ever-growing volume of scholarly literature.”

A well written article released in WIRED explained that an ORCID ID would accumulate credit beyond published papers. For example, speaking, data, public outreach and blogging would be attributed to a single source or individual, basically “…anything that helps science but currently goes unrewarded.”

Beyond The Book recently interviewed Amy Brand, a member of the ORCID Initiative’s Board of Directors (and Assistant Provost for Faculty Appointments at Harvard University). Amy provides a thorough overview of ORCID’s principles, vision and explains how it would improve efficiencies for all.

I’ll be discussing SSRN’s view on researcher ID systems – how a paper submitted by an author, their academic institution, a co-author or another publisher could be linked across all digital platforms. The real benefit of ORCID is that we will easily be able to connect the dots and allow readers to see author’s full body of work, the big picture … all in one picture.

Last week we released a project update to our reference and citation technology, CiteReader.  CiteReader allows readers to view the references within a paper submitted to SSRN and the citations from other papers in the SSRN eLibrary, making it possible for users to easily go backwards and forward in the literature.

Here is SSRN Chairman, Michael Jensen’s message about the CiteReader Project:

SSRN’s CITEREADER™ REFERENCE AND CITATION PROJECT

We have been working on extracting references from all SSRN papers for 5 years as part of the CiteReader™ project that SSRN has undertaken with our development firm, ITX Corp. We have created a system to extract references and footnotes from PDF files on SSRN and to have that extracted data proofread by human beings. While this project is not yet complete, we are now announcing the release of over 6.7 million references extracted from the reference sections of over 182,000 papers on the SSRN site as well as over 4.2 million citations that we have linked to SSRN papers.

• The references from each SSRN paper (where we have been able to extract them) can be found on the REFERENCES tab on the public abstract page for each paper.
• The citations we have matched to each SSRN paper are available on the CITATIONS tab on the public abstract page for the paper.
• These reference links provide an excellent way for any reader to go back in the literature in any area, and the citation links provide an excellent way to go forward in the literature.

Data on the Current State of SSRN’s CiteReader™ Project

• Papers with Resolved References: 182,645 out of the 270,109 full text papers on SSRN
• Total References Resolved: 6,689,847
• SSRN Papers with Resolved Citations: 180,339
• Total Citation Links between the Cited and the Citing Paper: 4,277,354
• Papers with Resolved Footnotes: 60,721 (we are giving footnote extraction priority to papers with no reference section)
• Total Extracted Footnotes: 6,899,585

NOTE: References in those papers on SSRN that do not have a Reference section have not been fully extracted as yet. We are working on this. These papers (primarily law papers) have their references in footnotes. This means that citations from law papers are currently dramatically undercounted in SSRN citation statistics.

SSRN is now extracting footnotes from all papers while giving processing priority to those papers with no reference section. We have extracted over 6.9 million footnotes from over 60,000 papers with no Reference sections thus far. These footnotes and the references we extract from them will also be appearing in tabs on SSRN’s abstract pages. SSRN is now perfecting the algorithms for extracting references from these footnotes. The undercounting of citations from and to law papers will be resolved over the next year as our algorithms are perfected and references from papers with no reference section are extracted from footnotes and linked to the papers being cited.

Sincerely,

Michael C. Jensen
Chairman
Social Science Research Network

While I was at the Kauffman Economics Bloggers Forum, Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University gave me an advance copy of his book “Selfish Reason to Have More Kids.” Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids is a thought provoking look into the  nature vs. nurture argument with a refreshing and interesting research foundation.

It was released today (buy a copy) and you can check out Bryan on twitter and the EconLog blog.

Thanks Bryan for your research and insight into the everyday exercise of  parenting (I definitely agree that kids are more fun than I originally thought).

On Sunday the revealing documentary “Inside Job” won an Oscar for Best Documentary (trailer, official site). This work has made waves by analyzing the financial collapse in 2008 and points the finger at corrupt politicians, financial advisers, journalists and economists.

And rather fittingly, a lot of people have recently been asking economists:

“Why are you one of the few professions left that operate without a code of ethics?”

While “Inside Job” was winning awards for exploring the financial tsunami of the last few years, economists reacted with an internal debate over disclosure. While some practice areas, including health economics (iHEA), do have disclosures and policy, the profession overall does not.  According to this NYT article, there is lots of room for improvement.

Tom Getzen, Professor of Risk, Insurance and Health Management at the Fox School of Business, Temple University and Executive Director and CEO of iHEA, has difficulty understanding how scientists who study incentives cannot understand why payments as consultants, etc.  shouldn’t be revealed in a public forum. (Disclosure: Professor Getzen is Network Director for SSRN’s Health Economics Network)

ICMJE (The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) is concerned about the issue and has a well thought-out policy about conflicts of interest. This type of involvement shows that these type of standards are becoming an expectation.

A sweeping change was recently proposed to Economists. Over 300 economists urged President Robert Hall that the AEA (American Economic Association) should adopt a code of ethics that would enforce:

“Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest that can arise between economists’ roles as economic experts and as paid consultants, principals or agents for private firms.”

The letter also emphasized additional disclosure requirements, making ethical transparency not only expected, but required.

Earlier this year the AEA’s annual meeting, the group stated:

“The executive committee of the American Economic Association voted unanimously to create a committee to consider the association’s existing disclosure and other ethical standards and potential extensions to those standards”

While this is a welcome first step, some say a code of conduct is long overdue. Yet others are more skeptical saying such a regulation would have no positive impact on credibility.

In light of “Inside Job”and the challenges specific to the AEA, what do you think? Is disclosure a no-brainer or is the issue more complex than everyone is making it?